Kim O'Hara wrote:Alex:Posting stuff twice doesn't make it twice as true. I will debate you - and anyone else - as long as necessary but it is unfair to innocent bystanders to make them read it all twice.

It is different forums, and my two posts are slightly different.

”Even the water melting from the snow-capped peaks can find its way to the ocean"

Alex, I took 20 seconds to check your first statement and it is completely bogus, out of context. Pierce Forster, far from being a Global Warming denier, is an author of one of the recent studies. Look here:

Piers Forster, one of the soot study’s authors and a professor at the University of Leeds School of Earth and Environment, said in a statement that reducing black carbon can help address rising temperatures.

“There are exciting opportunities to cool climate by reducing soot emissions but it is not straightforward,” Forster said, adding that cutting emissions from diesel engines and domestic wood and coal fires is “a no-brainer” because it would improve public health and the climate. Fine particles cause heart and respiratory problems, leading to premature death, as well as asthma and other illnesses.

These emissions cuts would produce an immediate cooling effect, the authors estimated, which would avoid a nearly 1-degree Fahrenheit temperature rise in the near term.

I mean why would any sensible person waste time rebutting what you put forward when you don't even bother checking your sources?

What do you have to say about the graphs that show that trend isn't toward warming?

Dan74 wrote:Alex, I took 20 seconds to check your first statement and it is completely bogus, out of context. Pierce Forster, far from being a Global Warming denier, is an author of one of the recent studies

And what is the right context? It tells me something that even proponents of AGW sometimes admit that temperatures are not rising.

We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest."Stephen Schneider (leading advocate of the global warming theory) (in interview for Discover magazine, Oct 1989)

Nobody is interested in solutions if they don't think there's a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous (global warming) is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are...former Vice President Al Gore (now, chairman and co-founder of Generation Investment Management--a London-based business that sells carbon credits)(in interview with Grist Magazine May 9, 2006, concerning his book, An Inconvenient Truth)

"Scientists who want to attract attention to themselves, who want to attract great funding to themselves, have to (find a) way to scare the public . . . and this you can achieve only by making things bigger and more dangerous than they really are."

"The biggest implication here is that scientists need to pay more attention to small and moderate volcanic eruptions when trying to understand changes in Earth's climate," said Toon of CU-Boulder's Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences. "But overall these eruptions are not going to counter the greenhouse effect. Emissions of volcanic gases go up and down, helping to cool or heat the planet, while greenhouse gas emissions from human activity just continue to go up."

Returning to cloaked mode.

All things are unworthy of clinging to (sabbe dhammā nâla abhinivesāyā). --Shakyamuni BuddhaWanting to grasp the ungraspable, you exhaust yourself in vain. --Gendun Rinpoche

By 2050 the world will most likely be occupied by 9.2 billion people. It will be hotter and harder to farm. We will need an area of additional agricultural land the size of South America.Now they tell us we'll have rooftop gardens; like the hanging gardens of Babylon. Roofs must be strong and waterproof and water must be carried or pumped up. Of course this greenery is a boutique solution to a serious problem. If you used all the rooftops of a large city it would only feed approx 2 percent of the population.Still this makes us happy and raises our spirits to see the green plants on the roof, colourful vegetables encouraging bees and birds into the area.I guess we'll have to live in hope.

(1) out of date and unsourced. (2) Out of date and wrong, as you say, but that doesn't mean the recent science is also wrong.(3) Forster appears to have some credibility but I would like to see the source and context before I said any more; Whiehouse works for a denialist think-tank which refuses to divulge its funding source (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Warming_Policy_Foundation); and Curry is a well-known denialist with little expertise in climate and less credibility.(4) Irrelevant and misleading. As I explained to you repeatedly in "The New Normal", what happened to climate over thousands of years when there were no people around did not affect people ( ) but what happens over decades - as compared to the last couple of thousand years - is important and will affect people.

greentara wrote:By 2050 the world will most likely be occupied by 9.2 billion people. It will be hotter and harder to farm. We will need an area of additional agricultural land the size of South America.Now they tell us we'll have rooftop gardens; like the hanging gardens of Babylon. Roofs must be strong and waterproof and water must be carried or pumped up. Of course this greenery is a boutique solution to a serious problem. If you used all the rooftops of a large city it would only feed approx 2 percent of the population.Still this makes us happy and raises our spirits to see the green plants on the roof, colourful vegetables encouraging bees and birds into the area.I guess we'll have to live in hope.

Hi, greentara,All valid ... but we can try to be a bit more positive, mainly by acknowledging that we must throw all our solutions at the problems. There is no silver bullet but if we have rooftop gardens, balcony gardens, streets turned over to gardening when the price of fossil fuel puts cars off the road for ever, etc ... and population control ... and lowering our environmental footprint in other ways ... most people will survive.What we won't have - and could never have had, even without climate change - is 9 billion people living modern American lifestyles. We would need not just another South America for that, but another half-dozen Earths. We need to downsize our expectations: the future looks far more like the century-ago past than it used to. That's not all bad, of course - lots of people were happy a century ago, and lots of them were healthier than most of us.

greentara wrote:Kim, Interesting, how will population control be implemented and by whom?

By governments, mostly, although I do see individuals' choices becoming more important. China has been doing it for years - not well, admittedly, but fairly effectively. They have population problems now, but nothing like as bad as they would have had without the one-child policy. India has moved in the same direction, I believe, but I don't know the details. Without being quite so draconian about it, governments can apply their usual range of fiscal incentives and disincentives e.g. tax breaks for larger families encouraging larger families. They are not new - we already have them, although they are weak and haphazard.And there is a strong, clear pattern in the developing world: as girls are educated, and as child mortality drops, women consistently choose to have fewer children and have them later. That's the best improvement of the lot, a win-win-win scenario.

We are not warming because of the trillions of gallons of ice melting into the ocean. Once that is gone you will see how you have been duped by the paid henchmen of industrialists and resource extractors. Since you obviously don't have a science background it works like the ice cubes in your Big Gulp.

Kim O'Hara wrote:(4) Irrelevant and misleading. As I explained to you repeatedly in "The New Normal", what happened to climate over thousands of years when there were no people around did not affect people ( ) but what happens over decades - as compared to the last couple of thousand years - is important and will affect people.

Earth doesn't care about how its climate affects people. It is cause and effect. You think that people are somehow special in the grand scheme of things (all 1/100+th seconds). Climate changes regardless of how it will affect humans.

a) Climate was changing over billions of years. There was no humans to drive big spikes in warming or cooling back then. So why can't the SAME thing be occurring today? The only difference that I worry about is the nuclear waste. Here we have a man-made problem.

b) decades or even 1000 years compared to 4.5 billion years is nothing. We can't judge a dynamics of a football game by 1/100th of a second. We have been on earth for too short of a period to affect climate (even if we could). Nuclear waste is another topic. Here, unfortunately, mistakes were made...

Please be careful with the use of "denialist". I am offended by it. It sounds too much like "holocaust denial" which I am against. As far as I know, nobody denies that climate changes.

Last edited by Alex123 on Mon Mar 18, 2013 3:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.

”Even the water melting from the snow-capped peaks can find its way to the ocean"

greentara wrote:Kim, Interesting, how will population control be implemented and by whom?

Pollution, radiation waste, etc. All these shorten life, and can cause infertility when accumulated enough. The way things are going, I hope humanity good luck to survive next 100 of years. I wouldn't be surprised if we will see 10s of millions of people starting to die in the next few years.

”Even the water melting from the snow-capped peaks can find its way to the ocean"

I've seen many charts of longer term climate and I wonder if we are warming at all. Warming compared to most recent ice age? Perhaps. But it seems that the trend is overally down. We are in some of the coolest period of time, at least in the past 540 million years.

I worry more about ice age than hothouse. For 100s of millions of years the climate was much much hotter than today. Compared to that, we are in cooling phase.

As for, humans didn't exist back then so it is irrelevant: I think that human's "split second existence" is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Climate doesn't have to be for humans. It is effect of natural causes. Cyanobacteria was on earth for 2.8 billion years. Maybe they are more "important" than modern humans (Homo Sapiens) who were only for hundreds of thousands of years.

”Even the water melting from the snow-capped peaks can find its way to the ocean"

Kim, Lets be honest we don't know how this massive population will be controlled....any fuzzy answer is not the solution to the problem. In addition China's 300 million middle class has the money and the means to afford a second child and they'll keep trying till they get a male child.

greentara wrote:Kim, Lets be honest we don't know how this massive population will be controlled....any fuzzy answer is not the solution to the problem. In addition China's 300 million middle class has the money and the means to afford a second child and they'll keep trying till they get a male child.

Perhaps "controlled" is a misleading word. It implies one person, or a group, turning a knob like turning a thermostat up or down. We know that the reality here is messier. "Limited" might be a better word. Population will be limited by the interplay of government control and social factors in China; it will be limited by starvation, sadly, in northern Africa for the forseeable future; it will be limited, as I said, by women in the developing world having fewer and later children as they get more education, equality and health care; and so on. We can't know all the factors or influence many of them but we know that some people in positions of power and influence are astute enough to see the looming problems and do something about them. My glass, as always, is half full - I think we will get better at managing the population bomb, not worse.

I meant to write this earlier, but I thought the above exchange was some of the greatest comedy on this forum. The optimist of ignorance, Kim O'Hara, "how dare you not believe that the scientists and engineers cannot solve climate change," and the denier par excellence, alex123, "there is no human induced climate change, it is a hoax, the paid representatives of the industries responsible told me so!"

There is a sci-fi writer, Daniel Quinn, who wrote an interesting scenario about an ape that can talk and communicates to humans. That ape who unfortunately as all good things, doesn't exist, says there are givers and takers, and that humans in our culture are takers because they only take, take, take and don't put back into the earth to replace what they have been given. Even if I form an "environmentally responsible" lumber company and replant a sapling for every tree felled it is still taking. A forest is an evolved eco-system that takes thousands of years to develop depending on complex interactions between simple flora, trees, insects, mammals, watersheds, etc. Humans cannot create forests, but we can re-plant a monoculture of factory like saplings for whatever we damage we do to the carefully evolved forests.I have never met anyone in my whole entire life who actually gave anything to the earth. And probably as always are lots of dishonest people posting here, but the honest ones know that all the people they ever met are thus "death dealers"(as another sci-fi depiction of reality called imaginary monsters because in the cinema they cannot sell honest portrayals of humans as monsters doing what they do best liquidating everything till it becomes money). People think giving is giving birth to more consumers, so they too can live pseudo life in front of screens and prod them to "do well in school," so they can "compete for equality"(Ivan Illich): READ: earn more more money upon graduation so they can consume and kill more. Infact the distinction parents and children is no longer very useful, there are just guardians of future consumers(parents) and consumers in training(who instead of working to become full consumers, go to the intermediary of school and beg their parents in order to consume). So you cannot expect future generations to be better, they will only be worse until the hydra consumes itself.

The problem is not technical, and can never be solved by scientists it is cultural, civilizational and spiritual. For so many decades we have heard warnings about environmental destruction and climate change. We could have devolved our disgusting complex civilization of death. We could have transitioned back to the bicycle, maybe even animal transport(though as a vegan I am opposed to this) and the foot as the dominate modes of transport. Instead I just rode my bicycle for about 30 miles and I saw only two other cyclists! But when I was at a parking lot of a commercial gym it was full of people who drove there, mostly to use stupid cardio machines because they are too fat, want to tone, want to get shape! Duh, of course if you rely on machines that unlock the stored potential of gas and consume a disgusting amount of high calories and wasteful animal foods, of course you will have society full of people who resemble beached whales and always join the gym(for a few months until they quit)! But under our societal values and social system this "waste" makes the most sense, why run or walk outdoors, or why bicycle outside to get places? Wasting as much resources as possible, exchanges the most amount of money, so it must be good. We could have built passively heated and cooled buildings that use thermal mass and not air conditioning or heating like earthships and straw bale houses. We could have adopted as a society a whole foods vegan diet, centered mostly on starches and grains, the cheapest, least energy intensive to cultivate and least polluting foods. But what expends less resources and creates less monetary exchange is the least desirable as far as our human created rules are concerned.

The more of the world everyone around you consumes and mounts on their walls, their shelves, put in their garage the happier they pretend they are. "I have a fleet of expensive cars, hopefully people will like or envy me now." The more wasted materials and entropy they create, the better they will convince themselves they are as people. I just watched an interesting documentary called Affluenza(1997) and they said consumption was once defined as being similar to destruction and that it was a synonym for tuberculosis. But now the opposite is so firmly established you can never convince all the rabid consumer-destroyers anything else, it will take a veritable nuclear holocaust or a mass die-off thanks to human created climate change to hopefully create stasis on the earth thousands or perhaps a million years later after our cursed species is tamed by our own stupidity and suicidal implosion. I see my co-workers everyday walking to their cars just to drive a few hundred feet around the yard because they are too lazy or apathetic to use their feet. There is no hope on a grassroots or leadership level. Either our culture will destroy the ability to sustain life on earth or we will destroy ourselves from our voracious death wish. Personally, I hope I live to see the day the supermarkets around me one day have no food shipments, maybe from a Hurricane that makes Hurricane Sandy look mild, and thus the society of disgusting of invalids have their life support cut off suddenly. Even if such an event would mean my death, at least I would get to really live for a few moments enjoying all the entropy coming to a boil.

All I know is that people in advanced economies don't want to really live. So that is why our culture despite so many warnings has done nothing. Like I said, no scientists could or will ever save us, we just had to consume less, and we already choose to cause a planetary crisis instead. Infact scientists are mostly autistic like imbeciles. They only concern with themselves with ancillary technical issues and cannot ask questions dealing with ontology, or question the parameters of their profession or their societal role. Really in the first place people only become research scientists because of the prestige and comparatively higher pay, that is to consume more! We needed the people who want and do the opposite, but they have no social power!

Last edited by Thrasymachus on Sat Jun 22, 2013 10:38 am, edited 1 time in total.

Well, humans like most species consume energy when it is available. We're not really different from a lot of other organisms in that respect.

Here in India overpopulation is a huge concern. Even up in foothills of the Himalayas it is crowded and getting worse. Settlers move into areas which were once inaccessible due to the terrain. The government naturally builds more infrastructure and this facilitates further consumption which in turn allows industry to profit and grow. As people make more money they consume more energy and become accustom to it, so they'll seldom voluntarily simplify their lives in any substantial way.

In India owning a car is prestigious. Owning an expensive import like an SUV commands respect. Most educated people strive for such things. In fact in a lot of Asia it looks like this. China, too, has a growing car culture. There's no space in the cities for them, but that doesn't matter. Here in Delhi they have billboard signs announcing how many more kilometres of paved roads have been built in the last few years. People see this is as progress and just reward for their hard work and taxes.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as they say.

We're so past resource overshoot at this point that I don't see any way to avoid a population and civilization crash within this century. Fossil fuels are finite, but moreover long before the last of it could be dug out of the ground it will become uneconomical to extract it. Drilling for oil in the Arctic for example requires high oil costs to justify, though if economies are failing then oil consumption will actually fall and the price will erase the value of drilling in a lot of places. On top of that we have climate change and overpopulation.

Civilizations run in cycles. Ours is no different. We won't get Star Trek.

There's a good talk by Dr. Joseph Tainter on how energy, complexity and collapse all tie in together:

His book is worth reading, too. A lot of his model is uncomfortably reflecting our industrial civilization, though we have the unique problem of climate change along with energy shortfalls. As time goes on we have increasing policing and legitimization, which is curiously what happens when a civilization is undergoing increasing stress which it can't organically cope with.